by Jane Gardam
‘I must see Maitland. Lady Celia will be answering the letter the chauffeur brought. He’s waiting. I’ve time.’
‘No—get sorted up yonder, miss. Roundstone waits. We don’t faff with Roundstone.’
‘Yes, I see.’
Lady Celia’s exhausted head was propped on a hummock of pastel-coloured pillows and above them drooped a spray of peacock-feathers and gauzy curtains like in Tennyson. Her breakfast-tray, a still life, was untouched upon the bed and she was looking out of the window and her hand holding Mrs Zeit’s letter seemed hardly attached to her. It was a dark bedroom. I stood at the foot of the bed.
She said at last, ‘You have called then? At Roundstone?’
‘No. Yes.’
‘No-yes? What is this no-yes?’
‘We got lost.’
‘Lost?’
‘We went walking. Paul Treece and I. We went much farther than we meant to and then we were told we were near Roundstone and Paul Treece was absolutely thrilled because he knows the people there.’
‘Ah.’
‘I said it was rude just to go in.’
‘You were right.’
‘But they are his very close friends.’
‘Paul Treece has very many “very close friends”.’
‘They’re all at Cambridge together. It’s all very under—’
‘Paul Treece’, she said, ‘is a go-getter. An enchanting boy, but a go-getter. You should be warned—though I don’t see him in great pursuit of you. The Zeit girl and her millions perhaps. He can write poetry—to a certain extent. This is why I invited him. He is very poor.’
‘Yes I see.’
‘And also he is in love with me. As much as that sort of man ever can be.’
I said nothing. She must have been fifty.
‘It is not unusual in this house. It is something I have to put up with very often. It killed my husband—my intense attractiveness to men of all ages.’
‘Yes I see.’
‘Will you please stop saying, “yes I see”. And please understand that we at Thwaite do not know those at Roundstone.’ There was a sort of electricity in the pillows as she turned her head and glared at me; a patchiness about the face which was not rouge. ‘They are people we are not able to know socially,’ she said. ‘Do you understand?’
How could you know people unsocially?
‘Yes. But—’ I was about to say ‘But Mr Thwaite goes to Roundstone often,’ when I remembered his nice lanky old figure in its breeches going off like a shadow towards the meadows.
She didn’t know.
‘They all seemed so very—interesting there.’
‘They are not. They are not interesting in the very least. Not at all.’
‘You mean because they are Jews and foreigners?’
‘Certainly not. Thwaite is full of Jews and foreigners. It is because they have no conception of anything we stand for. They laugh at aestheticism. And they deny their God. They find us amusing!’
‘I hated it about God,’ I said. ‘It seems so much worse somehow when they are Jews. But some writers don’t exactly believe in God. Isn’t that what they were all talking about on the lawn yesterday? All that about a primal force? And the Zeits do give millions of pounds to the poor.’
‘And told you so?’
‘Oh, not—Well, in a round-about way. Somebody said—’
‘Exactly. For us such people are without reality.’
‘But they all seemed so very real,’ I said. ‘They all seemed a bit too real. Very—solid.’
‘Ha! Solid–solid is exactly it. Up to now we have avoided Roundstone. I have never called. Yet this shameless letter has invited you and Treece to spend the day with them tomorrow. Picnics–no doubt with silver canapé-dishes and everyone dressed up in diamonds and high-heeled shoes. Motor cars. Businessmen from Tyneside in gloves. Please go down and ask Barker to send the chauffeur away.’
‘What shall he say?’
‘That a reply will be posted. They are philistines!’
‘Is he to say that they are philistines?’
A flash from the pillow. ‘Of course not, you fool of a child.’
I said, ‘Actually they know that they are philistines. They told me so. They say they can’t help it. I don’t think they’re at all—subversive.’
‘You seem—and come back: throw this letter in the waste-paper-basket by my dressing table—you seem to have got a very long way at Roundstone in a very short time.’
I dropped the letter, and in the looking-glass saw the peacock-feathers and the gauzes and the drapes of birds and flowers, an easel with a portrait on it of someone very rich but of spiritual expression, in a cravat—the husband killed through his wife’s magnetism for men. I wondered whether I liked aestheticism very much.
‘Oh we did get a long way,’ I said. ‘You see, I’d met them before, long ago when I was young, the two Zeit children. We got a long way then, too. It was on the beach. I loved them at once, and very much. And I couldn’t have gone with them tomorrow anyway, Lady Celia, because I have to go home.’
I did not see Paul Treece again before I left, for Lady Celia took him aside with her that afternoon and they were in close conversation all the evening. He smiled in my direction over dinner and after dinner I made off to the servants’ quarters where I felt they were sorry that I was leaving, and this was balm.
But I didn’t say much. Just sat, held Maitland’s knitting wool, listened to the cinders drop, the kettle sing. Nobody asked any questions about my being called home and I wished they would, for it might have strengthened me to say in words why I must go—for I had not explored the reasons why I was so sure. Yet in another way I liked being left alone. It was adult.
Maitland did say when I said goodbye at bedtime—for I was to leave early in the morning—that she hoped all would be well for me. I said that it couldn’t be well, exactly, with both my aunts gone.
‘Then who’s to greet you?’
‘I shan’t be greeted. There’s just Alice the maid, and Mrs. Woods. Mrs Woods is ill. That’s why I have to go.’
‘Who is Mrs Woods?’
‘She’s someone who lives with us.’
‘A servant?’
‘No, just someone my aunts have been kind to.’
‘Ah—a paid companion?’
‘Oh no. Not paid. She’s very important. I don’t really know much about her. But I think she’s always been important. For years.’
‘Well it seems to me it’s not very nice of you. You with your own life beginning. We’ll all miss you—won’t we Barker? We’ve taken a great fancy to you. Do you realise that? Mr Thwaite—we’ll miss Miss Polly.’ Mr Thwaite didn’t look as though he were going to miss me much. He was examining a bishop.
‘It’s good to have some straightforward young life here,’ she went on. ‘Now you’re to write to us. Will you write to us?’
‘Yes, of course. I think I’ll write very often. I think I might need lots of advice. If I’m to be in charge, with just Alice.’
‘In charge of this important old companion who is sick—advice you’ll need. What’s this Alice?’
‘Oh, she’s—she keeps apart. She’s very quiet and hardworking. She came from the vicar, she’s my age about. She’s the maid. But we think she may have to go, now that Aunt Frances and the vicar have gone.’
Maitland raised a long arm in the air and held her wool aloft for an extended moment. She said, ‘You’re to write, if ever you’re in trouble. No one manages alone.’
Mr Thwaite surprised me at the station—he had driven us himself in the trap, I and the snapping painter who was returning to London—by saying the same thing in his own way.
‘Letter not come amiss,’ he said. ‘No joke alone for a girl.’
‘I’ll write to Lady Celia tonight.’
‘Apart from bread and butter. Collinses. Personal to me. No S.O.S. ignored, directed to Arthur Thwaite.’
I wanted to thank him, to love him—
standing there looking high above our heads, his Don Quixote shoulders in the old Norfolk jacket, blue eyes peering about at the station traceries, examining the baskets of geraniums, the little swinging sign, checking the station-clock with his gold watch, thin as a biscuit. ‘Thank you very much for been the most marvellous—’
‘‘Here she comes. Right on time.’
Along the dead-straight track, puffs of smoke preceded the round face of the engine. ‘Here we are now.’
The painter and I got in.
‘Perhaps, let me know?’ said Mr Thwaite. ‘What you hear from India?’
‘Of course.’
‘Deplorable business.’ He touched his temple with the whip of the pony-trap and swung away, and I saw how blank his face had become.
The painter’s train to London did not leave for some time and so, on Darlington station, we sat together on my platform and waited for my train to the marsh.
He looked as mad as ever. He wasn’t snapping so much but he twitched his fingers and pulled at his hair and kept getting up and sitting down again. The day was grey and cold—the wonderful weather of Thwaite seemed already to belong to some sealed-off conservatory somewhere, some hot and distant island. Rain began to patter on the high glass roof of the station and a wind blew down the platform from the direction I was going to take. I shut my eyes.
I didn’t bother to speak to the painter and he didn’t bother to speak to me and I sat with my eyes shut until I heard my train clank in and then I climbed up and put my bags on the rack and let down the window to lean out and shake hands.
But instead of taking my hand he put a piece of paper into it. It was a picture of me sitting on the platform asleep, and it was the most beautiful drawing I had ever seen.
‘A young woman on the threshold of life,’ he said, and snapped the air and twisted his face about; and I laughed, because although the drawing was so lovely the face was also the most miserable face in the world.
‘The doomed traveller,’ said he.
And looking at him I saw what a miserable, smug, selfrighteous lump I was. What a heavy weight I must have been. And yet, for all that, he had missed none of the few good things. Seeing all, he had forgiven all, and had shown that, though I was young and stupid, there was some sort of hope.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘oh it’s wonderful. It really is very good,’ and he looked at me sharp and sideways—a ‘thank you kindly, Miss No one’. The whistle went, the flag flapped on the slamming doors. ‘You’ll be someone I’ll think of,’ I shouted, ‘I think you’re going to be very famous. It’s just like me. Oh I wish I didn’t understand things only when they were over. I’m not really a misery. Not by nature. Thank you, so very much. I’m a sort of Robinson Crusoe. I’m all washed up at present.’
Doors slammed.
‘Robinson Crusoe wasn’t so bad,’ he said. ‘A bit too bloody sane, but not so bad. Goodbye.’ He reached up a hard, warm hand then to the back of my neck and pulled my head down to him and kissed me. He stopped kissing me and then kissed me again harder, opening my mouth, pressing my mouth until it hurt, pulling his tongue inside so that I gasped out. The moving train jerked him away and was nearly off the end of the platform before I could breathe.
I could tell from his figure walking in the other direction that I was already forgotten.
Hearing people talk now, or reading about it, one imagines the four years of the Great War passing in England in benign and golden sunlight, occasional gunfire on the channel-breeze as we tended roses, rolled bandages and drank cups of tea, or handed white feathers about the pleasant streets. We are also told, endlessly, that the war burst and shattered us like a thunderbolt from a summer sky, like Crusoe’s demon pouncing upon him in sleep.
Neither is quite true. Even on the marsh we had heard uneasy things for some time—for about four years. For months before August 4th, 1914, Mr Box of Boagey’s, the doctor, the vicar had all spoken of a coming war and I remember Aunt Frances telling me years before her wedding when I was still a child, ‘Father always said that there will be war with Germany in the end.’ I had heard Mr Box tell Charlotte, ‘There’ll be war again, you’ll see. With Germany. I can’t stand Germans, but if I had to choose between them and the French as friends I know which it would be. Never the French.’ Charlotte said, ‘One foreigner’s as bad as another. I can’t abide Germans neither’—though wherever could she have met one? Or Mr Box a Frenchman? There was still, on the marsh, a faint shadow of pride going about that we had beaten Napoleon, and a curious Nelson-Worship—something to do with H.M.S. Victory—always called ‘Nelson’s Flagship Victory’ on the marsh, presumably because so many people remembered local men being pressed aboard her long years after Trafalgar.
Through the spring and early summer of 1914, when the possibility of war was mentioned, I remember no patriotism, only sombreness. Perhaps, of course, on our queer island on the marsh we were different and dour. Certainly we were on August 4th, 1914, which was by all accounts throughout the rest of the country a most glorious golden morning.
With us it was raining. Round the yellow house there hung a cold, early-morning sea-fret and Alice and I looked out at whiteness as we dealt with Mrs Woods’s slops and dirty sheets and made ready for the day. Out of her window we could hardly see the little privet hedge. The sea might not have been there, but for its insistent whisper—the long wave from the Gare to the breakwater turning and collapsing, turning and collapsing just out of sight. Not a bird uttered and we could hardly hear the bells.
What Mrs Woods could hear, of course, or see or understand about war or anything else, goodness knows, for she had had a stroke and for more than a year now had lain looking at the ceiling, not speaking, but groaning a great deal when Alice and I lifted her twice a day.
For I must now say what happened when I came walking home in 1913 over the marsh from Thwaite towards the yellow house—a changing marsh, for I had been a month away.
I noticed how it was shrinking. It wasn’t just that I was two feet taller than when I first knew it, so that the flowers and grasses were so much further off. The marsh itself had diminished. The chimneys had crept up on us, and so had the workmen’s houses on the mud-flats with all their plumes of smoke bending together away from the sea. And the streets up around the church were closer too and there were more of them. There was a large and prosperous blossoming of lodging houses.
And I noticed what must have been there for a while, a broad tarmacadammed road running along and out towards us before the sea, stopping well short of the yellow house certainly, and cracking here and there with sprouts of persistent grass—brave ugly grass, which might win yet. But it was a road.
The yellow house stood high with its big windows flashing and the sea behind it tossing and the big ships sliding along the horizon waiting for the tide into the estuary. Oh, beautiful house.
I climbed the steps and the door was flung wide to an empty hall and the vicar’s Alice turning her head away from me with embarrassed relief.
‘Tooken bad five days,’ she said. ‘I got the doctor.’
‘Is Miss Younghusband here yet?’
‘She’s not come. I wrote. Like to you. The nuns up at The Rood say a Retreat’s when you’re closed off from things.’
‘Yes, but not in a crisis. Mrs Woods might have died.’
‘Well, Miss Mary’s not here. There’s been me alone.’
She was very frightened. Wisps of hair and a dirty apron.
‘I’ll go up. Is the doctor coming every day? You’ve done wonders, Alice. I came as soon as I could,’ which was true. But how in the last few hours I had yearned to be back. I dumped down my bag and went up and held Mrs Woods’s bedroom door-knob.
In all the years of my childhood I had never been inside her bedroom but I knew that when I opened the door there would be a smell—the sour, dreadful smell of her. I knew that she would be looking towards the door as it opened, looking at me with the resentful bitter face I’d scarcely ever seen so
ften or smile. I prayed, ‘Help me’ and thought ‘Praying—how ridiculous.’ The people at Thwaite would not need to pray—the Olympian writers who had come to tea, mercurial Paul Treece, the snapping painter. Or the Zeits at Roundstone. Strong effective brilliant people who knew how to enjoy their lives in long summer visits, and endless pleasures—never with morbid thoughts of God. None of them believed in God. They had the wonderful freedom of not believing in God, the freedom denied even to Robinson Crusoe, otherwise the steadiest man in the world though very likely not Confirmed.
Look where praying had got my aunts. To India with Mr Pocock, to a cell where they wouldn’t let you out to look after your friends. Look where it had got Mrs Woods—a husk on a bed with no one to love.
I wondered then about Mr Thwaite, if he prayed, and at once I knew that he did; and it was seeing his mediaeval face in my mind rather than a message from anything higher that gave me the courage to turn the door-knob and go in.
I saw a clean room, very bare, a thin carpet with a broad surround of blank floor-board, a white cotton bed-cover, no curtains, and over the fireplace a cross. The window was wide open and the swish of the sea came in, comforting and steady. The room smelled salty. She was not looking at me but straight upwards, the side of her face drawn slightly down and dribble was coming out of her mouth. She was wearing a thick white very clean night-dress, her arms out of sight under the quilt. She seemed exceedingly small. By not a blink or a flicker did she show that she was glad to see me, or could see me at all. The expression of ferocity in her eyes had gone. They held none. Her hair on the pillow I noticed for the first time was thin and there was a pink blob on the top of her head where it had worn out.
The horrible thinness of the hair had to be looked away from. I said, ‘Mrs Woods. Hello. I’m so sorry. Whatever have you been doing—frightening us all? Well, I don’t know! You can’t be left alone for a minute.’
What was all this? Kindness? I was awkward with kindness. I had never learned it. You have to learn kindness very young indeed. Kindness had been sketchy in Wales.
‘We must brush your poor hair,’ I said (We!). ‘Dear me, we must set things to right.’ I hated her still.